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Saturday, March 03, 2018

`What Satanic Arrogance'

I’ve come to
think of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s volumes of memoir – Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope
Abandoned (1974), both translated by Max Hayward – as the twentieth
century’s foundational texts. To use a reviewer’s cliché, they are “essential
reading,” unlike any English-language volumes from the same period I can think
of, except perhaps Whitttaker Chambers’ Witness.
By recounting in detail her life and her husband’s in their present and recent
past, she foretells much of the future, our present.

In “Soviet Fate, Russian Hope,” published in the March issue of The New Criterion, Jacob Howland describes Hope Against Hope, as “an invaluable account of the collapse of
intellectual life and the terror and bleakness of everyday existence at the
height of ideological tyranny.” Howland isn’t shy about drawing parallels:

“How did
things come to such a pass? [Mandelstam] sheds light on the matter in Hope Against Hope, and especially in the
more expansive and desultory reflections of HopeAbandoned. `The basic error of our
times,’ she writes, was the replacement of `the idea of popular education . . .
by the political concept of indoctrination.’ (`What do the people need to be
indoctrinated for? What satanic arrogance you need to impose your own views
like this!’) The `accumulated riches’ of culture and tradition were deliberately
spurned and forgotten, and the `religion’ of `progressive’ ideology—`the idea .
. . that people can foresee the future, change the course of history and make
it rational’—was speciously elevated to the rank of science.”

Sound
familiar? Howland, however, carefully refuses to devise a one-to-one correspondence
between the U.S. in 2018 and the USSR in, say, 1938 (the year Mandelstam’s
husband, Osip, was murdered): “Although we do not live in anything like the USSR,
all of this has begun to feel weirdly and depressingly familiar. In the United
States, public schools and the media, as well as the wider spheres of culture
and commerce, have become theaters for the contentious enactment of identity
politics, which crudely subsumes individuals into broad and largely arbitrary
categories.”

In Hope Abandoned, Mandelstam abominates any
naively rosy understanding of human nature: “Everything we have been through
here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one
is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith
in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human
behavior.”

Mandelstam
may be the most bitterly ironic writer (and she is a writer, not merely a documentarian) since Swift. Her narrative is
unrelenting, and she leaves us—her oh-so-fortunate Western readers -- feeling like
callow teenagers: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent
foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and
cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the
seductions of evil. Read the final paragraph of Chap. 41, “The Years of
Silence,” in full:

“This book,
which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is
nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in samizdat or has found it ways into print
(as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But
even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain.
Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert
task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They
will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their
strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and
despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought
of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged
rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature
designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom
nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by
their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really
succeed in their task of universal destruction?”